I've used OpenSUSE before, but never on my own systems. I'm now attempting to understand it better as we have an application in development which will run on OpenSUSE.

OpenSUSE has a 'Tumbleweed', 'Factory', and a 'Leap'.

There is very little clear and concise information on the official OpenSUSE website describing the differences between these. The information is jumbled, mixed, poorly written and frustrating. (The OpenSUSE Wikipedia article appears outdated as well.)

Question

What is the difference between these various OpenSUSE releases/flavors?

install a container in top of Debian with OpenSUSE and be done with it...
– Rui F RibeiroNov 19 '15 at 21:24

@RuiFRibeiro ---> You could not answer the question with an actual answer but I admire your snark.
– Frugal RasinNov 19 '15 at 21:26

We have had SuSE and OpenSUSE here. Remarkably similar to RedHat/CentOS. SuSE is the paid version, and you guess it OpenSUSE is the free version. I am not joking. I know very soon I will be asked to install a RH application and I will do the same.
– Rui F RibeiroNov 19 '15 at 21:29

I am not that experienced in SuSE. I migrated all of it to Debian a lot of moons ago. I do maintenance in scale, I do not intend to administer clusters of different OSes.
– Rui F RibeiroNov 19 '15 at 21:34

1 Answer
1

The Factory project is the rolling development codebase for openSUSE
Tumbleweed.

There is a constant flow of packages going into Factory. There is no
freeze; therefore, the Factory repository is not guaranteed to be
fully stable and is not intended to be used by humans. The core system
packages receive automated testing via openQA.

When automated testing is completed and the repo is in a consistent
state, the repo is synced to the download mirrors and published as
openSUSE Tumbleweed. That usually happens once or twice a week.

Factory is mainly used as an internal term for openSUSE's distribution
developers, and the target project for all contributions to openSUSE's
main codebase.

Power users, developers, and openSUSE contributors are recommended to
use the Tumbleweed rolling release.

Conservative users who just need a working system ("if it ain't broke,
don't fix it") are advised to stay with the current stable release.

Just a note, from my perspective, the clarity could possibly use some work. As of now, opensuse.org refers to Tumbleweed as "Stabilized!" and "Tested!" and to Leap as merely the "most complete" "regular-release". To an outsider, this could seem to be the opposite of what the wiki says.
– Benjamin StatonNov 22 '15 at 15:34

I do get that from the wiki, but coming from Debian land myself, I just looked at the opensuse.org site ... and found that clicking for more information on Tumbleweed tells us that it is a "stable platform", whereas clicking for more information on Leap does not mention the word "stable", but describes Leap as "stabilized", which described Tumbleweed on the previous page. Room for more clarity there, I'd say.
– Benjamin StatonNov 23 '15 at 1:42